


Down and Up Again

by Cards_Slash



Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Angst, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Near Death Experiences, also graphic recovery?, as in look this guy doesn't magically get better in one day, nothing happy at all really
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-18
Updated: 2013-08-19
Packaged: 2017-12-23 23:13:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 20,192
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/932205
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cards_Slash/pseuds/Cards_Slash
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Everything that is lost can be found again.  Or how Bones died once or twice after an away mission gone wrong, the lengths to which people are willing to go to save him and what happened after.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> 1\. not an AU, i swear even though it may seem that way at first it is not and everything will be explained.  
> 2\. don't read this expecting birthday parties and happiness. you'll be disappointed.  
> 3\. also set after Star Trek Into Darkness. the only relevant spoiler is the bad guy in that movie.

The old tub was beaten out of shape at the rim, kick-dented along the sides and dropped at the end of a long-barren stretch of packed-dirt that turned to sand in the long hot months of the summer. The metal was viciously hot in the early afternoon and a heated hum in the early morning when the fat-and-lazy mare nuzzled sweet nothings to the patches of scratchy grass that stretched the whole sloping edge of the hill. The whole world opened up beneath the short-steep fall into broken brown earth, the sun split open the between the two sharp cliffs in the distance. There were moments, caught between this breath and that one, when he could almost believe he was the last-living-person in the whole of the world. For the rest of his life it would be this, a fat and lazy old mare that walked slow and steady down a packed-dirt road with a sled full of boiled-hot pans of water and a beaten metal bath tub.

\--

The illusion came and went with the days; his dirty little shack was the last house dotting the endless land. His angry pair of goats and his slim slip of a heifer calf were the last surviving signs of civilization. The chickens had gotten fat and tasty. He ate them on alternating Sundays, sitting outside in the dirt, thinking about the kind of life that he’d left far behind him.

\--

There were still places where the world was fat with riches, where the people were horded into tight little boxes, stacked one on top of the other until they reached with greedy-gripping fingers for the stars themselves. There was an infinity of wants and needs in the dim and smoky cities that he’d left far behind. He’d been someone, once upon a time, a long time ago. 

\--

The travelers came in fits of agony, crawling to his door with hunger in their faces and a tight starvation across their ribs. There was nothing to do about them, no food to give them, no directions to offer them, no consolation to share with them. They were wretched and stretched, long since driven to madness by the endless nothing they had been cast into. Nobody (but him) left the cities on their own. They were pushed out through the walls, dropped into the haggard ground and left to fend for themselves. The lucky few were killed and eaten by the cannibals that made camps outside the walls, gone spotted with the madness of their disease. Those that survived were left to wander through the _nothing_. 

If he were a kinder man, if he still had it in him to be a kind man, he would have taken the still-sharp axe out by the slanting woodshed in the back and put the poor bastards out of their misery. Capital punishment had never sat right in his gut but there were things far worse than a quick-death. He turned the travelers away and he stood guard at the shaky windows and the door with no lock until he was sure they’d moved on or until he found them lying dead, face-down, in the scrubby-short grass. 

\--

“Get on,” he said to the goats, and the calf and the midnight poachers that licked their long-snouts and made circles around the hastily made fence that kept the goats in. 

“Get on,” he said to the old mare when it stopped on the long walk to the tub to lick at the ground.

“Get on,” he said to the aggravated sting of memories when they haunted him across the bleached-out nothing.

\--

There were things that he remembered, that were pressed so deep into him that they were imprinted on his bones. But there were things that he’d forgotten, that had dropped away from him in the long, dragging steps that led away from the shimmering life he’d left behind in the city. He’d forgotten his face, what it must have looked like in polished glass mirrors or reflecting back at him from long-flat screens. He didn’t know the color of his eyes or the shade of his cheeks, he could tell by feel the slope of his nose and the height of his cheekbones and the shape of his mouth. He couldn’t remember how old he was, couldn’t imagine from the blurry image of his own body in his mind what age he must seem closest too.

He’d forgotten time and noise. He’d forgotten words—whole sentences, and the inane and babbling niceties that had once been so important to him. He’d forgotten the presence of other people—not the wretched dying—but real people, ripe with life.

\--

The baths started as necessary therapy, a relief from the pain that plagued his legs after the miserable walk that led him to the last abandoned house at the edge of the world. His feet had been swollen with blisters, his legs lashed from miles of denser bushes that let out to the great flat lands. His body was pink-streaked with infection and ragged with pain. Boiled water and a long soak was a momentary relief, an old-world remedy to draw the infection out of the wounds. (Maybe, or maybe he was trying to die faster.)

They were a ritual now, the long walk, the long soak, with his eyes closed against the bright-bright blue of the endless sky. He watched the hazy-white clouds drifting over his head and the immovable mountains in the distance looking away at the horizon. He felt insignificant and it brought a certain kind of peace.

\--

He had not forgotten his name (not yet) but it was slipping away from him. There was nobody to call him, and no need to remember it or any of the other things. The syllables were losing meaning, becoming nothing but sounds that had become disjointed from the other.  
But he still sat in the evenings sometimes, and watched the poachers dashing back into the dark shadows and repeated his name back to himself to try to make sense of it.

\--

It broke at once, like a fantastic crack of thunder. Maybe it was his own fault for not bothering to hide the tracks the sled made when he walked down the path to the bathtub or maybe it was simply a matter of time until he was hunted down. He’d gone soft and disinterested with isolation; he’d stopped listening for the sound of shuffling boots. 

“I admit that I did not expect to find you in such good condition,” the stranger said when it stopped at a polite distance away. His shadow was a tall sliver across the side of the tub and the gray-tinged water inside. “You continue to surprise me.”

The voice was a grating pain against the back of his neck as he stared determinedly out at the silhouette of the cliffs in the distance. They were fixed, unmoving, and certainly could not care less about this interloper’s attempts at disturbing their shared isolation. He swished the water in the bath and dumped it over his head, scrubbed at his face and the irritated scratch of the beard he hadn’t shaved off in days. And then he stood up—heedless of the specter of a shadow carefully turning a modest circle to face away from him.

He dressed the way he always did, took the mare by the crude bit of rope around her neck and loaded the pots and pans onto the sled. He did not look at the stranger, he did not speak to it and it seemed to heed his indifference as an invitation.

\--

The house was only a few rooms left of a much larger house, the doors did not have locks and the walls were not built to hold out the rain and wind. But he closed the doors at night and he made a bed in the safest corner he’d found. The stranger had followed him home, and through his chores, it had stood as still as a sapling just feet behind his back while he mended the fence and took the goats out to forage for food worth eating. It had cleared its throat at the stream bank when he went to gather water and folded down to sip at the cool-clear water.

The shadow had stood, unflinching while he lazed on the stream bank and caught a few fish to fry for dinner. It had followed him again—so still even in its footsteps and so quiet it barely breathed—and watched over his fire while he cooked, expressed no interest in his food and brashly invited itself into his house. 

The stranger was a blocky shape out of the corner of his eye, seen by accident when he did not turn his head fast or far enough. It seemed safest to ignore, to pretend that it simply was not there. But the stranger took off its pack and laid out a bed, put its weapon at the side of it, sat still and ate as silently as it could before laying flat. 

He could feel the stranger staring at him as he stared at the wall. On and on it went, until there was a low-muttered, “Fascinating,” behind his back before the stranger turned away from him and he was alone-at-last.

\--

The stranger was awake before him in the morning, looming in front of the house—long and leaner without a pack on its back. The goats were milling around in their pen with agitation while the old mare nickered unhappily at him when he came around to pat her on the side of the neck. “Get on,” he said to her. 

It dogged him, though, for days—a constant shadow that did not speak or attempt to be seen but stayed just behind him and took up modest space in his little house. It did not help itself to a bath or to food, it did not offer to take up chores. 

\--

“I am certain,” it said one evening while it stood to the side of him, “that you are Leonard McCoy. As a case study, you are perhaps the most fascinating specimen I have had the opportunity to observe. I have several theories about how to, as you may have said once, break through to you. However, I am uncertain which would be the most effective.” It spoke like a robot, a voice coming from the long-distant cities that he’d left behind years (and years and years) ago. “I find it curious, this feeling that I have, that if you were at full capacity we might have argued about how best to approach this situation. Perhaps all three of us might have had an impressive discussion about the relative merits of my ideas. You would have been violent with your human passion. I feel that the lack of that passion is what troubles me the most.” It went quiet for a while, not moving or speaking. It hardly breathed. “I do not wish to be alone,” it said to him.

\--

(His name was Bones, that he remembered, in his nightmares it was always his name in a scream that went black at the edges and faded away. He thought (he _remembered_ ) that somewhere, far way in the cities, someone had been screaming for him.)

\--

“Get on,” he said to the mare in the mornings, and the stranger let him have his baths in silence. 

There was always game waiting by the door when he came back. He ignored it for days and the stranger came and took its kill to clean and prepare it and left it sitting for him on the wobbly table in the second room of his house. 

For days he didn’t eat it. And the stranger carried on, undaunted, searching out in the scrub grass and the greener hills beyond for nice-smelling leaves to flavor the meat. Again and again it went out to dig in the ground and came back with more-and-more food. It seasoned the meat and fried fat mealy potatoes it found and set the food out day-after-day. At the end of the day, the food was carried out to the poachers. 

The stranger sat with them, in the distance. Its back was long and straight, rarely curved forward in the way that Bones’ back felt like it was. He studied it when it wasn’t looking, the stark black of its hair, the greenish tilt of its skin.

But his stomach growled and clawed at him with every-passing-day and a great storm blew in that left him shivering and cold, trapped in the closed circle of his wobbling house and rickety fence. The stranger brought in food, even through the rain, and left it sitting on his table.

He ate it like an animal in the early afternoon of the second day of the storm. The stranger sat in a chair just beyond his back, still and straight-backed. “My name is Spock,” it said, “I am sure that you would remember me if you would look at me. I am sure that you do remember me,” it said to him. 

No. He didn’t remember any such name. But he took handfuls of the finely roasted meat and left the room. The stranger was a pale blur to the side as he went past him as quick as a spooked animal.

\--

Spock talked to him, after that, every time he ate. He talked about many things, about the long distance he had to travel, about the statistical unlikelihood that he would have found McCoy (that’s what Spock called him). He wondered at that, like a poacher after the bones of the roasted animals. It astounded him, confounded him, and Bones kept listening to the ignorant babble of his numbers and letters.

“I think it is time we talked about Jim,” Spock said to him after he finished eating. “Even if you could forget me, you would not have forgotten Jim.”

“No!” Bones screamed at it, at the specter behind his back, at the cities in the distance, at the scream in his nightmares. “No!”

\--

They did not speak for days. Bones did not eat its food, he dumped its things in the yard, he closed the door to its constant intrusion and ignored its footsteps in his house. He was agitated and mean to the goats, and rough with the mare. He did not enjoy his baths in the morning and left the chores undone to stomp up and down the scrub grass.

\--

(But he remembered Jim, clever-quick Jim with a clever-quick grin. He remembered Jim in a hundred-thousand different ways: his voice and his skin, his mouth and his tongue, his hair and his eyes, his sitting-and-standing body, the way he walked and the way he spoke and more-than-anything, most of all: Bones remembered the way Jim died.)

\--

“I have hypothesized that you will not look at me out of fear of recognition. I have revised my hypothesis in light of your violent reaction to the mention of Jim’s name,” the stranger said as it stood by his bath. “It is not your fault that Jim was murdered and the burden of saving his life was not solely on your shoulders.”

And so it followed him again, always talking-talking-talking about the life they must have shared in the cities, about every excruciating detail of their days. It spoke of the academy they attended together (Jim and him) and of the duty they were assigned after graduation. He spoke of the integration of alien species to the cities, the acceptance of the vastness of the universe beyond their knowledge. “Jim accepted me with haste,” it said to him, “you were always far more shrewd.”

For days, sun-up to sun-down, he was assaulted with the history of his life.

\--

“Get on,” Bones said to the goats while the stranger followed him with his voice like a drone, repeating (word for word) the story it had already told.

“Get on,” Bones said to the cow.

“Get on,” Bones said to the mare and to the poachers that had picked up a pack of scruffy-scabby pups that followed the stranger like children after a mother.

\--

“I have decided to ‘switch tactics’ as Jim might have said,” the stranger said, “Jim and you were already together romantically when I met you. You were an inseparable pair, it was a common discussion topic in the cafeteria of our joint apartments. It seemed that everywhere I went I heard about the two of you and your romantic entanglements. I was surprised, when I finally met you at the seeming crudeness with which you treated one another. I am alien to your world, and mistook your ‘teasing’ for some true dissent.”

No.

“But it became clear after we were assigned to the same duty that you were truly inseparable. Indeed, the captain often thought and spoke of you. He was especially fond of you—”

“No!” Bones shouted at him.

“When you were least interested in his fondness,” Spock said. “Your proclaimed disinterest in him and infamous temper was what drew him to you. He was deeply enamored with your passion.”

“No!” Bones shouted at him. He scrapped the chair across the floor and picked it up by the wobbly back and threw it toward the voice. He did not break but came to an abrupt stop. 

“I loved him as well,” Spock said. 

\--

“You were never gracious,” Spock told him while he stood close by his elbow during his bath. “You were aggressive, hostile even, toward me from the start. It was many years before Jim told me that he had confided in you early that he had intent toward me.”

Bones closed his eyes (and there was Jim, clever-quick Jim, with his lick-lapping tongue peeking out of the side of his mouth and his shoulders in muscle bunches as he crawled up the thin-thin apartment beds. His mouth was filthy with words, his naked chest pink with embarrassed arousal. His whole body was hot-to-touch and smothering close, pressed up against Bones as his voice whispered-whispered dirty-fucking-words in his ear. He said ‘we can have him, you know. He wouldn’t stand a chance against you’ and his words were a groan set to the cadence of his rolling hips as they slipped together skin-on-skin. ‘God, nobody stands a chance against you.’)

\--

Bones found the stranger in the dark, crawled across his body with his eyes wide open in the blackness, seeing nothing but what his fingertips could make out. The body was familiar to him, the straight-shape of his chest just like the slim-thin shadow. And Spock made only the shortest of little noises before he went quiet and only barely settled his hot-as-hell hands against the bend of Bones’ naked knees.

It had been (so long) since Bones was skin-to-skin with anything but hard metal bathtubs. He traced the lines of Spock’s clothes and plucked at them where they buttoned and lay flat against his skin. Again and again until he wormed his hands under the layers to the heat of his skin, found the trail of hair on his belly that led up and up to his chest, and the alien beat of his heart. (Faster, faster, faster than any human’s heart could beat.)

Spock pulled his own clothes off, in the dark, set his shirts aside and lifted his hips to slip his pants down and toed his boots off at the end of his mat. He was quiet and still, touching only when he was sure that Bones wasn’t going to bolt.

They made an eternity of touching, Bones rubbed his palms and thumbs in tight where Spock’s body dipped—the center of his chest, the hollows of his shoulders, the dimple at his throat, the spread of his lips and the ridge of bone just above his eyes. He ran fingers over the pointed end of his ears, down his throat, and pressed both hands against his chest as he rocked his hips, knocking their bodies together in some imitation of (something he remembered).

Spock touched his face and Bones turned his head and bit him—as hard as he could—(didn’t even understand why), and then shoved himself away, back across the floor to the safety of his own bed.

\--

“Shortly before he died,” Spock said, “Jim confided in me that he had intended to join the program that allowed people of your planet to join crews already in orbit. He had every intention of going to Starfleet and becoming a cadet. He said that he wouldn’t leave you. He said that you would not come.”

Spock was silent for a while, watching the nothing all around them, “this does not make you responsible for his death.”

\--

At night, Bones crawled over to Spock, explored his body without asking permission, and Spock did not try to touch his face, didn’t bother to touch him anywhere but the bend of his knees. His breath was always a quiet pant, his objections were always shifts and twitches of his skin when Bones pressed too hard or in too familiar a place.

But it was coming back now, all the secrets Bones had ever known about this man’s body, about the way his face looked in the bright-light of day, under the flickering halogen bulbs at the academy, out in the bleak nothingness where they built new cities. He had started remembering the dark spaces next to Jim in his memory, about Spock’s face (flat, expressionless).

\--

“You’re wrong,” Bones told him (in the dark), “it wasn’t Jim that loved you first.” 

“May I touch your face?” Spock asked (so quiet, so light).

Bones moved away from him.

\--

Things had stopped making sense. The goats seemed absurd in their rickety pen, the calf seemed perpetually stalled before puberty. The tub—kick-dented and beat out of shape seemed unreal at the edge of the cliff. His house, unfinished and wobbly, seemed ridiculous. 

His memories were out of order; the cities were a noisy-blur in his head. 

But the land around him was vast and endless and the nothingness of it was numbing. The flatness, the sameness—

“How did you find me?” Bones asked Spock in the dark. He was sitting on his hips, tracing the familiar rise of his ears, rubbing the damp seam of his mouth. The words that Spock spoke were mangled by his fingers, licked and bit into the insistent press of his thumb and fingertips, until Spock grabbed him by the wrists and sat up. His body moved with a fluid ease, unburdened by the plight of starvation and the ache of travelling so many miles by foot. He’d never been hobbled, never exhausted by effort but always the same. The power in his hands was an impressive bruise against Bones’ skin. 

“I don’t think you’re real,” Bones said against his cheek. “You can’t be real.” He sagged his body forward, pressed it against the sure weight of Spock’s. “I don’t want to die alone.”

Spock’s cheek was smooth against his rough one, his chin pressed in against his shoulder. “I will not let you.”

\--

But Bones did not look at him in the light and Spock seemed to understand this. He did not talk incessantly now but stood by him as he walked through the scrub grass, over the hills and down the hard packed ground. He was a quiet observer of the absurdity of their situation—the only house in miles, the only animals in miles. 

There were no more visitors now. There was nothing but Spock two steps behind him and the bright flicker of blue (blue, blue, blue) that always darted just out of his peripheral vision when he saw it.

\--

It came to him, in the evening, that he knew Jim had died and that he had killed him, but not how he died. He’d always known that he’d died screaming (Bones) and that he was _lost_ but he could not remember that _how_.

\--

Spock kissed him in the dark, in the space between their two beds and Bones clawed at his skin to pull him down. Their bodies were made to fit like that, with Bones pulling at him and Spock smothering him with the alien heat of his skin. Jim had called him lazy with a grin on his face and Spock and worshipped his sprawled out body with methodical precision. 

“I can’t remember how he died,” Bones said when he pulled his face away from the kiss. And Spock’s forehead was a hard knock against his but his fingertips were flighty against his face. His whole body was crushing Bones in place and the strange comfort of it was the first thing that had felt _right_ in years.

“He didn’t,” Spock whispered to him, like he was afraid that he might be heard, and then his fingers pressed into his skin leaving dimples and the while world bleached out white.

\--

“No!” he yelled at the impassive white doors. “No!” he railed at the unimpressed screens beeping over and over with the rise and fall of his heart’s beating. “No!” he screamed at the vent in the wall that dropped little nibs of food that he threw against the walls and smashed into the floor with his bare feet. 

No to the scars on his legs.

No to the strange coldness of this world.

No to the blankness in his skull that had replaced all the certainty that he’d built around a world of scrub grass and dirt. No to the other world, to this world, to either of the worlds and how they rubbed and beat against each other inside of his skull and left him dizzy and confused.

No to the faces that peeked through the doors, to the flashes of blue that haunted at his peripheral vision.

\--

The stranger (no, Spock) came back with an unapologetic raise of his eyebrow, standing fully in front of him beyond a clear spread of wall that had been white the day before. His shoulders were boxy, thin and his body was long and slim. His shirt was blue, stretched across him and his skin was green-tinted but his lips were pink. (Oh and Bones knew him, how he had always known him, every annoying detail of him.)

“We believe this is a side effect of the poison that nearly took your life. The effects have lessened significantly in the past several weeks and we believe that they will continue to lessen over time.”

Bones turned his back to him, stared resolutely at the gray wall.

\--

They kept on for days, the food from the vent in the wall, the white-and-invisible wall and Spock standing outside of his cell. There were others, in blue uniforms that came and went with curious stares at the back of his neck. Bones sat in the gown they gave him, hands in his lap, staring at the wall.

They told him he had to eat.

They told him that he was safe.

And they snuck up behind him and stabbed him in the neck.

\--

“Spock told me that I shouldn’t be here. He said that the poison affected your memory the worst.”

Bones closed his eyes, felt his head fall forward, felt his whole body caving in on itself. He slumped forward, back slipping away from the invisible wall they turned white during the busy part of the day. He flattened out along the ground, belly down and staring at the gray wall.

“He said that your mind coped with the loss by creating a barbaric society that you had cast yourself out of after I was killed.” And the voice was getting closer, like it was moving toward the ground. There was a waver in the solidity of the clear wall—barely audible, maybe hallucinated. “Spock said if you saw me it would fracture the last modicum of sanity you had retained. So I stayed away—from your biobed, from this room, from medical bay. And then they said that you wouldn’t eat.” 

(I know you, Bones thought, in another world, I know everything about you, every story, every scar, every centimeter of your skin.)

“You can’t die on me, Bones,” Jim said to him. And after a pause, the long drag of silence, “please don’t die. Please don’t leave me.” A quick-draw of breath, “please.”

\--

Spock came again and he slipped through the clear wall when it shivered and waved in-and-out. He sat in front of Bones, arrogantly assuming his welcome, and crossed his legs. He rested his hands in his lap and leaned his shoulders against the gray wall. His hair was brighter in the lights, black-as-night but silky and shining. It was his face that was different in this world, not as old and worn as Bones remembered it but unmistakably young. 

“There may be no cure,” Spock said to him quietly, “and we have begun discussing the possibility of addressing your quality of life as our primary focus. You will understand that Jim is very adamantly opposed to what he perceives as giving up hope. If you could remember him, as he is, you would know how quick he is to find solutions to situations that have none. But we are incomplete in this, we are missing the vital piece to fix this problem.”

And Bones might have laughed—might have—but there was nothing left in his chest but empty spaces. He was propped against the invisible wall, thin and wasted without eating and not even the shots they snuck in to give him could keep his body from caving in on itself. “Me,” he said.

“Yes,” Spock said, “you see, we had previously believed that the attack on you was a mistake; that they missed an intended target but as this illness has played out we realize now that their intention was always this.” He looked sad, sad in a way that his face was not meant to look—as hollow and empty as Bones chest was now—and he shook it off with a flinch of muscle in his shoulders and a quick squint of his eyes. “You were a doctor here.” He moved to stand and retreat beyond the clear wall but Bones caught his hand when he was close enough.

“You told me I wouldn’t have to die alone,” Bones said.

“I would greatly prefer it if you would live,” Spock said, but he sat, shoulder-to-shoulder with Bones.

\--

Bones woke up to Jim—not clever, not quick—but furious. Jim as he’d been in the first days, angry and hurt and hateful. He wasn’t ready for Jim, to see him, living-and-breathing, gone pink with anger that couldn’t be soothed. He wasn’t ready to feel Jim’s hands—rough as hell—against his skin, for the strength of his arms when he lifted Bones off the floor and set him on the cot in the corner. He wasn’t ready for the smell of him this close, sweat and skin and federation-issued detergent.

“If you don’t eat, I’ll shove these down your throat and you’ll die from choking to death on my fingers,” Jim said to him. He had a mountain of little nibs—brown and tasteless—and his words were an edge of desperation like the starving strangers that found their way to the door of his two-room shack. 

“It was you,” Bones mumbled, “you couldn’t stay away, you can’t ever stay away.”

“I _won’t_ ,” Jim said to him—stared right at him, “let you die like this.” He held up the first of the nibs—squishy and square—and didn’t look away from him, not once, even after Bones opened his mouth and let him push the food in past his teeth. It went on forever, the mechanical up-and-down of chewing, the dry and tasteless pile of food, and the uncomfortable clench of his stomach at the long unfamiliar bulk of food. 

\--

Bones slept but he didn’t dream. He stared at the gray wall while the world moved on behind him and he chewed-and-swallowed when Jim showed up with a white-gripped-fury on his face. 

And he leaned against Spock when he came, enjoyed the silence he brought and the finality of his looming death as it grew closer and closer. Spock understood, Bones thought, how hollowed out he was getting now, how there was nothing left in him, how he didn’t even want to be here now. There were too many things he couldn’t understand anymore, too many sounds that made no sense to him.

They didn’t talk about quality of life anymore.

They didn’t talk about cures.

“I did not love you first,” Spock said to him, when the mad rush of the world at their backs seemed dim and slipping away. (Bones thought, he must have been dying if Spock was going to talk about love.) “I found you offensive and needlessly abrasive. You insulted me, many times, and your arguments were always flawed. You based your views on emotions and there is very little logic in emotion. You were never gracious, even after Jim announced his intention to ‘win me over’, but always difficult. Our relationship was not built on a solid foundation, there is no logic in the attachment I feel toward you. I was often unsure of your feelings toward me—you are exceedingly changeable. But you said to me once, not very long ago, that you inherited your mother’s temperament and that while you were never going to be ‘easy to love’ there was nothing more sure in the universe than the fact that you loved me as you loved Jim.”

“I’m sorry they took that from you,” Bones said, because he was (at least, at very least) sorry about it. He’d lost them too, in the other world, where Jim was dead and Spock was a stranger that followed after him in shadows. 

“Please know that however difficult I find you to be, I love you as sincerely as you loved me.” Spock’s hands were warm when they touched him. Bones closed his eyes and rested against him, let his thumb run across Spock’s skin and thought that it wouldn’t be so bad to go now, like this, knowing that he was safe here, at last. “I don’t want you to die,” Spock whispered against the side of his head and his voice was scrapped raw against his throat when he said it.

\--

Jim cried like a child, as if he’d never been taught that grown men were simply not allowed to cry with their fists rubbing welts into the bone above their eyes and snot rolling down their faces. He cried like his ribs were breaking, so that every miserable sob was a quake that shattered through him. 

Bones was exhausted by the effort of breathing but he rolled forward on his knees, reached out with fingertips-gone-gray and found Jim’s angry red skin, folded his hand around his neck. Jim was damp with sweat and wet with tears when he moved forward, wrapped his monstrous arms around Bones’ chest and pulled them together. His face was hiding against his chest and it did nothing to smother the sound of his gasping despair.

“I’m sorry,” Bones whispered to him, “I’m sorry you’re losing someone too.”

“I hate you,” Jim said to him, against his hollow chest, “I want him back, I _need_ him back.”

Bones closed his eyes, rested his head against the bony top of Jim’s, nose full of the smell of his shampoo. “You always were so ridiculous. You don’t need anyone, you never have.”

“Don’t sound like him if he’s never coming back,” Jim said.

No, it wouldn’t be fair. “I’m sorry,” Bones said again.

\--

But it was the woman that came day after day long after the others had given up and moved on. She was an anomaly, something he could not remember—something that had been wholly removed from him. Her dress was blue and her hair was bright-clear blonde but her mouth was a quick-sliding frown every time she looked at him. 

And it was the woman, after the others had come to him in tears and stuttering confessions of love that picked him up by an elbow gone-all-bone and pulled him out of the room. “There’s no reason to keep you there if you’re not even strong enough to stand.” She put him in a chair that hovered off the ground and tucked a blanket around his lap that did nothing to touch the chill that seemed to be sinking into bones. She crouched in front of him, one hand over his and she looked right at his face—at the face of someone she thought she must have known—and she said, “you are the meanest man that I have ever met, you are the hardest boss that I have ever worked for and you are the best doctor that I have ever seen. They think they’ve figured out what you would do if you were staring at them dying in a cage but they’re wrong.”

“What would I do?” he asked, because she needed him to ask.

And she stood up and looked at him, that quick-sliding frown on her face—and then she slapped him on the side of the head with no attempt to stay the force. It rocked through him like a shock of pain, something more _alive_ than he’d felt in days. “How about you figure it out,” she said. Then she went around the back of the chair and pressed the screen there so it hummed and purred and started moving.

\--

The starship (as she called it) was immense—immeasurable as they walked through it. She took him through the halls, past the darting forms of red-gold-blue that hurried past him without looking at him, to the mess hall where the off-duty work-weary sat with trays of every-food-imaginable. She took him to the observation deck to watch the lazy spread of stars drift past them. They were nothing but specks of bright-white light set in the distance. He felt small and insignificant in the way he’d felt in the tub.

It wasn’t a comfort here.

“You have a daughter,” the woman said. She was sitting on a square cushion, leaning forward, looking out at the endless spread of nothingness. Her arms were covered in gooseflesh and she shivered at the chill. “They haven’t sent any official messages out yet—they’re a mess without you. That’s the Captain and First Officer that we’re talking about here, our ship is being run by men trying to stride past grieving someone they lost. They won’t send out the messages, you know, until they’re sure.” She turned to look at him over her shoulder and he thought (no, I don’t remember you at all). “I don’t think you’d want them to give her the chance to see you like this. It’s not the memory you want her to have of you.”

It wasn’t a memory he wanted to have of him.

\--

She walked him through the halls, talked sweetly to whoever they passed, used their names with great emphasis and they pointed stared anywhere but at him. They called her Christine and Chapel and Nurse. 

\--

The room she took him too had gone dusty with disuse, left slightly out of order with an overwhelming clutter of things here-and-there. The bed was made to regulation standards but seemed utterly unused. The couches were stuffed with bits of things that had been set to the side in the evening and never picked up again. 

“Mine?” he asked, because it seemed like the only logical place she’d take him.

“Yes,” she said. “If you could remember, don’t you think that you’d rather be here with your own things?” And she picked him up again, like he was nothing but a feather and laid him out on the bed. She fed him nibs of food without the venom that Jim had and tucked him into the regulation blankets. The lights dimmed without being told and she sat at the edge of the bed while he shifted and rolled under the covers.

“Why are you here?” he asked.

“They might be the ones that love you loudest but they aren’t the only ones that love you. You will not die before I figure out a way to save you.” She said it like it could be so easy, like she could simply decide that it would not happen and it wouldn’t. 

\--

It went on, the same, the walks and the bits of history—different than the one Spock had told him in another world—and Christine at his bedside with a pocket of nibs he was expected to eat and a stalwart determination to keep him breathing. 

\--

Jim came to see him, in the morning, to talk to him about things that didn’t mean much. They were orbiting this planet or they had received this order. His words were wrung out and dry, searching for any sense of recognition that Bones could offer. It seemed safest, nicest (even) to say nothing at all. So he kept his peace while he sat on the couch and ran his hands over the things his-other-self had left behind.

Spock came in the evening, and said nothing, but sat with him until Christine appeared to keep vigil at his bedside.

\--

It wasn’t hard to figure out the exact moment the whole world caved to the inevitable. There was no great parade of people at his door, nobody left to say good-bye, nobody that wanted to see the skeleton that he’d melted away into. Spock came the night before and stayed through until morning, never moving or speaking but resting his fingers lightly against Bones’ graying skin. It must have meant something to him because he left with a metal-stiff backbone. 

Chapel came in the morning, looking fresh and pink, but her smile couldn’t manage to fight for it’s place on her face. She took up her seat by his bed after attended to the ugly details of his last living days and sighed. There was a look of temporary concentration on her face, that last gasp of defiance against the inevitable, as if her denial had the power to do anything but leave him floundering in white silence.

But Jim did not come, not the whole of the day, not in the evening when Chapel was walking one end of the bedroom to the other, arms wrapped around her belly and fingers rubbing painful welts into the backs of her own elbows. She kicked a wall when the chronometer chimed the end of shift and went over to the table where she left her hard-backed black case. 

“You can hate me,” she said to him with her hand on the smooth-smooth silver hypospray, “you can hate me all you want when you’re alive to do it.” And she turned his head and jammed the thing so hard in his neck that the shock of it knocked the breath out of his chest. Her hand was on his cheek turning him back to look at her. The fury on her face was more life than he’d seen in days-and-weeks. Her bitter betrayal of some other him brought a light into her face that he hadn’t seen before. She pinched his chin in her fingers and said, “fight.”

\--

There was no miraculous break, no spiking seizure of victory. 

\--

There was simply nothing, a blackness that gathered with rapid urgency and drown him. He slipped away without fighting, without pain. There was a period of drifting, a weightless infinity where he was neither alive nor dead but some combination of the two. It went on-and-on.

\--

What happened was this: another mission, another planet, another argument between the two immovable egos. He was neck deep in compromising for Jim and Spock when the locals (as he liked to call them) found out they were trespassing. Their whole planet was wrapped up in a brutal civil war that was tearing the population to little bits and pieces. 

Spock argued for non-interference and Kirk argued for finding some kind of local remedy for the plague that was spreading out from the southern regions and killing young-and-old alike. Bones had twenty minutes and a weary flame to investigate the cause of death and came away with no better ideas than when he’d gone in.

Some kind of poison, a toxin that attacked some vital part of _being_ and left shells where people once had been. Without a source, there was no hope for discovering a cure. Bones was trying to tell them that the whole fucking argument was a fucking waste of time because there wasn’t a fucking thing that he could do (not like this, not with what they gave him to work with) when the stabbing prick of pain hit him in the back of the neck.

The dart was tiny-tiny and brilliant red with his blood when he pulled it out of his neck. He had enough time to squint at it before Jim was shouting and Spock’s arms were around his body yanking him to the side. He felt when his body hit the ground and then there was simply nothing.

\--

It wasn’t Jim or Spock. 

There was no great blaring of alarms, no rush of bodies and faces taking up space in his line of sight. There was only a muted blue light from the monitor over his bed and the steady-sure, beat of his heart reverberating all through the tiny-tiny privacy room. All around him there were machines in state of disrepair, one for lungs and one for hearts and one for rebuilding muscles. There was a dermal regenerator sitting by the beside table looking used beyond warranty guildelines and a litter of medical waste on the floor that had been left where it landed. 

But his body felt beaten, from the inside out, stretched all out of shape and snapped back together with all the precision of a child banging around building blocks. There was a great smothering of cotton between his ears, taking up all the space where he thought something must have been—a foggy half-awareness of something. He licked his lips, found them wet-and-slick with hospital-issue moisturizer and groaned at the taste of it before he dug his elbows in against the mattress and managed to shift his whole body up an inch or two. 

The effort exhausted him and he collapsed in place without ever really having moved, licked his lips again and looked around he until he found something living. Chapel was in a chair, bent to the side, face resting on her hand with her mouth open in a tiny snore. She had a case of hypos in her lap and a whole litter of PADDs around her. There was a trashcan overwhelmed with the scraps of far too many take-out meals from the mess hall and the tiny little bathroom in the corner of the room had a weak light coming out of it with a pile of yesterday’s uniforms clogging up the doorway.

“What did you do,” he said after a try or three. The words were tiny in the room, barely loud enough to be heard. 

She jerked away anyway, fell out of the chair, threw the hypos over her head and landed on her ass in the scattered dirt. It was just a matter of seconds before she yanked herself up by his bed and stared at him with her eyes and mouth hanging wide open. “You’re awake,” she said. (Like if she said it too loud it wouldn’t be true, like she thought it was all a dream.)

“Only a little,” he mumbled, “what did you do to me?”

“What do you remember?” she asked, “do you know who you are?” It wasn’t medical procedure but desperation that asked him. Whatever she’d done, whatever had happened, he’d gone off and died on them. 

“Leonard McCoy,” he mumbled. Because his words were slurring together in the fog between his ears, and his body was waking up by pieces, pricking up with pain that he couldn’t identify and discomfort of being laid flat and left out to dry. “I’m somewhere on the Enterprise—I think, better not be the med bay because someone’s getting fired if it is.” He waved his fingers around at the mess but they were barely lumps under the blankets covering him. 

“You stupid son of a bitch,” she said and she surged forward and kissed him full on the mouth without so much as a grimace of disapproval at the taste of the moisturizer. She smelled unwashed and her hands were frigid and he was crinkling his whole face up in a frown when she laughed at him like a bark and kissed him one more time. 

“I’m very flattered but—”

She slapped him on the cheek with all the affection a nurse could manage and straightened herself up and made short work of stripping him out of the piles of blankets and covers. She inspected every single inch of him, turned and shifted and huffed and sighed and took notes on everything she found. When she was finished she drew up a hot sponge bath while he worked on waking up all the way. 

“What happened?” he asked when he was sitting up with the biobed supporting his back and nothing covering the stick-thin lines of his legs and arms. He was half-wasted to nothing, just the dried out husk of what he’d once been. “How long has it been?”

Chapel started at his legs. “You were in a coma for three weeks. Spock believes that the toxin that you were attacked with was systematically destroying your brain, he followed you into your coma through a Vulcan mind meld and brought you back out. It wasn’t you, but you hung on for about three more weeks until it became apparent that you were not going to come back and that your body was going to continue to die.”

“What did Jim do?” Bones asked. He managed to shift one of his legs a few inches to the side and Chapel’s chilly hands washed far up the inside of his wasted thigh. For a long stretch of minutes, she said nothing at all and then she dipped the sponge back into the warm water and stood up, hip leaning against the bed. “What?” Bones asked.

“He watched you die,” Chapel said, “twice—three times, if you count how we were all sure that you were never going to wake up from the original coma. He tried everything he could think of, he went after the natives on the planet, he found the origin of the toxin and he had everyone in medbay work on synthesizing an anti-toxin. We worked double and triple shifts to figure out how to neutralize the effects and every time we thought we had it, we tried it on you. Nothing worked. You were not there.”

No. But—

“You have no idea,” Chapel said to him with tears in her eyes, “what you’ve put us through. You will never know.” And then she picked up the sponge and scrubbed his body until it was pink with fresh blood under the paper-thin skin. She washed his hair with a tub resting where his pillow used to be and shaved his face with a softly-humming razor.

He sat and thought about the things he remembered, searched through the grayness for an echo of something and found there was nothing (at all, not even a thing). She found a pair of scissors and sat on the side of the bed by him and clipped the long ends of hair by his ears and hanging in his eyes. “Do they know what you did?” he asked.

Her eyes were down, not looking up, and her breath stalled for just a moment before she looked up again, blush on her cheeks that wasn’t embarrassment or defiance but something between the two. “They know that your genetically enhanced tribble mysterious disappeared about the same time you started to make some kind of progress.” Her fingers fluffed through his hair and she clipped here and there again. “You should sleep for a while, I’ll clean up in here.”

“How long has it been?” he asked. But he meant, what happened to them, where are they now?

“Four months,” Chapel said, “now do what I said, doctor.”

\--

Sleeping, after everything, was easier than he thought. He closed his eyes to the sound of her picking up the mess of keeping him alive and thought about the grayness between his ears for a while before he found himself waking up to the same dim blue light and the sound of the monitor keeping time with his heartbeat.

Chapel was coming back into the room with a fresh uniform and a tray of food that he couldn’t possibly be expected to eat. She sat it down on the table beside his bed and pulled the chair she’d been using as bed for God-knows-how-long up to the side, close enough it could be sat in and far enough away it wouldn’t trip anyone on a mad scramble to get to his bed. She smiled at him wanly, exhausted all around the edges, and then let out a breath. “I’ve kept my mouth shut—nobody has any idea. It’s up to you if you want to interrupt the middle of duty or if you want to wait until they find their way down here.” She looked at the chronometer on the wall, “Spock usually shows up first.”

“I think I’ve kept them waiting long enough,” he said. Not because he had, but because he couldn’t remember the months without them, only the frustration he’d felt in those seconds before the whole world bled out black around him and he woke up here. “You look like you need real sleep,” he said.

Chapel smiled at him (really smiled, as beautiful as she ever did) and shook her head, “we’ve still got a long way to go, doctor. Don’t go getting any ideas about getting rid of me any time soon.” Then she excused herself to make a call and came back again looking supremely satisfied with herself. She sat in the chair next to him and pointedly looked at the tray of food he was doing just find ignoring. “It goes in your mouth or I’ll pump it into your stomach. Trust me when I say this, you do not want Jim Kirk to walk in here and find you with uneaten food.”

“In a minute,” he said.

\--

They did not come together, Jim came first, dragging his body along like a beaten dog, tail all tucked up his ass. He looked like he had no idea what he was expecting to find and stopped short in the doorway of the tiny room, face all white-blank and eyes hollowing out. His pulse was a too-quick throb in his neck before his hands tightened into fists, his whole stance shifted from weary to psychotic.

“Don’t you look at me like that,” Bones said, “now we’re even and maybe you’ll think twice before—” But Jim was knocking into his body—full force—before he had a chance to finish the sentence. His arms and fingers were blunt and painful, constricting around him like a snack and his head knocked into him with all the force of a concrete block. Bones had enough space left to get an arm around him, enough coordination to dig his fingers into the back of Jim’s Captain’s uniform. 

“Don’t you ever,” Jim said to him, tried to say to him, was kissing him on the mouth without any reservation and then pulling back to look at his face, to really look at him like he hadn’t ever seen him before. “It’s you,” he said.

Bones didn’t know, wasn’t ever going to know (hopefully) what the hell it must have been like to look at someone you loved and not see them anywhere inside. He didn’t know what Jim needed now, didn’t even know what four months had done to them, or how to get back to where they were and the immenseness of the unknowing was terrifying. “What’s left,” Bones said.

The door opened again and Spock—outwardly unflappable Spock—came through it like he’d been running through the halls at high speed just to get here. He crowded close as he could get with Jim lying across the bed, took up the space where Chapel had been a moment or two before. His hands were hot-as-fire when they touched Bones’. “I see you have finally upheld your end of our bargain.”

Bones had no fucking idea what it meant but he nodded anyway and Spock’s fingers were all over his in a mad scramble. 

\--

They did not leave but they did loosen their grip on him, took up space by his bedside, Jim even sat down in the chair that Chapel left before he noticed a whole tray of food sitting uneaten. It struck him like a bolt of lightning, that food left there, and his lips went flat and his fingers started rubbing together in that way that meant someone was getting their face fucked up any-second-now. 

Spock eyed it with less violence but no less contempt.

Bones ate because he had a nagging feeling that it was going to be forced down his throat whether he wanted it or not. He asked them about their mission—figured it had to have changed, figured they had to have moved on by now—and Kirk talked in short distracted sentences about the new planet they were observing while he watched the slow-methodical way Bones chewed through the tasteless mush Chapel had brought him to eat.

“I have to go back,” Jim said, eventually, “make sure—” Something was being done right; there was no excuse necessary but Jim made a hand motion to attempt to explain one and then stood up and left.

Spock stayed, lingered after the door closed, and cleared away the tray and bowl of mostly-eaten mush. He did not sit but stood and seemed hesitant and uncertain about what he wanted to say. “Our first priority will be returning you to full health,” he said.

“What will our second be?” Bones asked. He was tired again, slipping back into place among worn out pillows. 

“Returning Jim to full health,” Spock said. He ran his fingers across Bones’ again, like bidding him good night before he dipped forward and kissed him—just ever so lightly—and pressed their foreheads together. “I expect nothing short of a miracle, doctor.”

Bones put his hand on Spock’s neck; felt the green-flush of heat, “you don’t believe in miracles.”

“Then correct me by creating one.” Then he was pulling away and Bones didn’t want him to go, tightened his hands on Spock’s skin and hair and pulled him back. Spock sagged against him, went limp as jelly and pressed his face against Bones’ chest and let himself be held. 

“Bring him back to us,” Bones said softly, “I’ll figure out how to fix it.”


	2. Chapter 2

The movement came from the left, a distant shuffle of clothes over legs and arms and the whisper-thin sound of a blanket sliding out of place. It could have been anyone at all, except for the catch of a half-snore and a snuffling frown of breath that was distinctly (one hundred percent positively) _Jim_. Bones groaned at the dark in the room, the suffocating clench of blankets around him and the conspicuous absence of bodies around him. 

“Where are you going?” he said into the darkness, across the room, to wherever Jim was retreating. He stretched his arm out and hit the side of the biobed where there should have been an infinity of body-warm space and frowned at it.

“Nowhere,” Jim whispered from across the room, “go back to sleep.” But he was moving in the dimness; a shape barely discernible from the darkness around it. 

(No, stop, where the hell was he?)

“Oh shit,” he mumbled into the standard-issue pillow under his head, to the crush of blankets smothering him into place, to the cold reality of his private sick bay room. “I forgot.” His voice was a hoarse croak, and his body was brittle sticks when he tried to stretch out the kink that seemed to have settled into his bones. But he rolled onto his back and licked at his dry lips and managed to prop himself up just a little higher on the bed without exhausting himself.

Jim was standing still, back to him. The shape of him was coming into focus now that the track lights were perking up at the motion in the room. His silhouette looked ghoulish cast in blue light, shoulders stiff and broad and head hanging down, hand dragging down his face. The blanket was in a puddle over the side of the chair and there was a litter of new PADDs next to the chair.

“You know what I remember,” Bones said—since they were here, since his brain was perking up in a way his body just couldn’t seem to manage. “Yesterday morning you were complaining about Spock’s cold feet keeping you awake and I was so _sick_ of listening to your bullshit—I remember telling you that if it bothered you so much maybe you ought to rethink your sleeping arrangements.”

“That wasn’t yesterday, Bones,” Jim said. He took his time about turning around, but he collapsed into the chair in an instant, deflating all at once. It was close enough he could have leaned forward and hand his hands on Bones, but too far away for Bones to reach out and touch him. “That was one hundred and thirty two days ago.”

That seemed like an infinity, a passage of time too immense to be recognizable. Bones rubbed his fingers against his face. “Well, that’s what I remember.”

“You really don’t remember any of it?” Jim asked (like a wonder, like he couldn’t _imagine_ ). 

He couldn’t even remember that there was something he should have been remembering. “No,” Bones said.

Jim let out a breath, lick-lapped at the edge of his mouth and turned his head toward the wall like it was enough of a shield that Bones wouldn’t be able to figure out what he was thinking. Like his every-single-thought didn’t move through his entire body. A sudden tight flinch of furious hurt that tangled up around his chest and released out in an aggravated shift-and-kick of his legs and arms. “Well, that’s probably better than the alternative. You wouldn’t have liked the person taking up space in your body.”

“You’re mad at me,” Bones said. It was best, out in the open, right where everyone could see it and talk about it. Things like that festered up in your chest and drove you away from people that you loved. He’d done it once that way and it wasn’t anything he was willing to do again. 

“No,” Jim said and then, “yes,” but then again, “ _no_. I’m not mad at _you_. I’m just—I’m—”

“Mad at me?” It was an offering, because Bones could take the anger, but he couldn’t take the silence.

“No!” Jim shouted. He was standing again, fists curled up uselessly and releasing back into hands. He had nothing but reasons to be angry and nothing to do with it at all. “Yes?” he said again, “you _died_ , you didn’t just die you died again and again. You didn’t even try, you didn’t even fight—you just let it happen, over and over again.” Jim wasn’t looking at him, wasn’t turned toward him, and the outline of his body was blurred out in blue and fading back into dimness as the track lights faded into a low hum now that they were stilling into place. 

“I told you there was no curing what the toxin did, that there was—”

“I _know_ ,” Jim snapped at him, “I’ve had to listen to this over and over again, I know there was nothing you could do, I know there was nothing we could do. I _know_. But you weren’t there,” he turned around then and the lights perked back up all around them. “You didn’t have to watch the person that you loved sit and do nothing but starve themselves to death. You didn’t have to hear some _body_ tell you how sorry it was that you were losing someone you loved—you don’t understand, it was everything you are. It was your body and your voice and it wasn’t _you_. You didn’t even _try_.”

“You’ve lost people before, Jim.” 

“I hate you,” Jim said, so quietly it was barely even audible. “I look at you and I see the _thing_ that took your place and I can’t separate how much I hate it with how much I want you to be real, how much I want this—how much I want everything to be…ok again.”

Bones stared down at the blankets, at his own useless hands. It wasn’t pain (not exactly, not _precisely_ ) that worked its way through his chest but something like (despair). He cleared his throat and looked up at Jim, saw him stripped straight to the bleeding parts. “My old Granny had this thing she used to say to me, after my mother died. I don’t remember much about it, you know, my mother dying. I know that something ate her away, like it took all of the color and brightness out of her life and left us with something gray and hollow in her place. I’ve seen those pictures and I know, somewhere in my head, that I should remember those years—because it was years. But I don’t remember how she died anymore, I don’t remember the last months of her life. My Granny said to me, there are things that a body just can’t help, there are things a heart just can’t forgive, and there’s no shame in those things. But, if all you want to hang onto is how much you hurt right now than you’re no good to anyone and you might as well go.”

“Are you telling me to leave?” Jim asked.

“I’m telling you, there’s nothing I could have done. Sometimes people die, Jim. Sometimes you can’t save them. I’m not dead now and I’ve got a lot of work to do before I’m much of a person again.” _And I can’t deal with you now, not like this, not when there’s no strength in my arms and no power in my legs._

His answer was silence, stillness as the lights faded out again. The room went dark with a shudder and Bones sighed out and shifted his body back into a comfortable rut in the bed. Jim kept on breathing, taking up space in the darkness between his bed and the chair. His ears were burning with want of hearing a response and he fell asleep searching through the darkness for any sign of Jim.

\--

There were no curtains to rip open on the Enterprise, no sharp, abrasive light of day to sever the last grasp of sleep. All the same, Chapel woke him up with the same brisk efficiency as his mother had years-and-years ago in Georgia when he was sleeping through alarms and complaining about school. There was a certain posture that his mother got when she was determined to drag him out of bed (kicking and screaming, if necessary) and a certain perfectly satisfied smile on her face when she tore open his curtains to the brutal light of day.

“I hope you slept well,” Chapel said to him (just as cheerfully as any mother said to their defenseless child), “because we have a lot of work to do.”

The chair where Jim had been was empty, the PADDs and blanket gone. Bones groaned at the light, at Jim (at stupidity) and struggled to roll himself onto his back. Chapel was at his bedside before he managed it, stripping his blankets away in one efficient jerk. “I slept,” he said.

Chapel put one hand under his knees and the other on his shoulder, made short and easy work of sitting him up on the side of the bed like he was no more a burden to her than an unruly blanket in desperate need of being flipped out. She kept both of her hands on his shoulders as the world swam in-and-out again. “I’m sorry about the Captain,” she said as the room stabilized around him. “I could have kicked him out but waiting another couple of hours wouldn’t have made anything any easier for you or him. I’ll tell you what he said after we get you out of this bed.”

“That’s not necessarily motivation,” Bones mumbled. But he did his best to help her as she lifted him up to his tingling useless legs and shuffled him across the room to the chair. She was coated in sweat and he was cringing in unfamiliar pain by the time they were through. “Do you hate me too,” he asked with his arm still around her shoulders.

Chapel’s eyes were blue but darker blue. For a minute she scrunched up her face like she couldn’t figure out what he meant and then she frowned just at the edges of her lips and said, “No. Do you hate me?” The words were a raw wound the same as Jim’s quiet (I hate you). 

“Not yet,” he said, “but I’ve never been much of a fan of physical therapy so I’m sure I’ll manage to hate you before we’re through.” He smiled at her as much as he could and she leaned forward to bump their heads together. In any other life, he could have fallen in love with her, should have fallen in love with her in this one. “What did Jim say?”

“He said: I’m sorry.” There was no hesitancy to her words; nurses weren’t made for sugar-coating things. When she slipped away, her hands stuck at his shoulders, pushing him back against the chair. “I’ll give you a few minutes to sit up before I bring your breakfast.”

I’ll give you a few minutes, since I broke your heart.

I’ll give you a few minutes since Jim was too much of a coward to do it himself.

\--

Spock came for breakfast, sat uncomfortably on the edge of the remade biobed and watched him with a stern disapproval until every single sip of the green-graying gruel was gone. It was slipping down the back of his throat like slimed-over-slugs while Spock shifted on the bed. There was a silence that was settling around them, a soft-slow kind of thing that was going to suffocate the whole fucking ship in a matter of days.

Maybe it already had, one hundred and thirty two days later.

“Jim is wrong,” Spock said to him quietly. Because of course Spock had seen Jim, put his hands on him, felt the raging war in his head, felt the brutal pulse of his broken heart. Spock had always needed Jim (always, always, years before they met). His body straightened, feet against the ground, shoulders gone stiff-and-proper. 

There was no comfort in that. Then, again, there wasn’t any comfort to take in situations like this. What good was knowing that Jim was miserable too when only-yesterday they were perfectly-fine (by their own skewed standards) and Jim was bright-and-brilliant with sly-slipping grins? 

“It shouldn’t be a shock,” Bones said, “significant others don’t usually stick around this long, and miraculous recoveries cause more divorces than infidelity.” He had no statistics to back him up on it, but the bitter truth was burnt into his mind through the short-and-long years of being a doctor. 

“That is illogical,” Spock said.

Bones looked at him. “What about you, what do you feel about all this? I’m not dead but I’m not alive and you’ve been mourning me for one hundred and thirty two days.”

Spock moved faster than Bones could track, was crouching in front of his chair with both of his hands over Bones before he could register the soft breeze of the air being displaced. His eyes were wide-open (and wet) and there were words on the tip of his tongue that he wanted to say and stopped, just there. No, an emotional scene would be illogical, not conducive to healing. “He doesn’t understand why you had to kill him when you started to lose yourself,” Spock said, “in your fevered dreams, you convinced yourself that you were responsible for his death. You couldn’t see him, not matter how hard he tried, and he can’t understand why.”

“He’s stupid,” Bones said.

There had to be a hundred things that Spock was going to say, one after another flashing across his face: not stupid but hurt, or defeated or just lost, but never stupid. Jim did not possess the ability to be _stupid_ the way Spock didn’t possess the ability to lie. But Spock dipped his head down, rested it against Bones’ knees. 

Bones rubbed the hair at the nape of his neck, thought of day-before-yesterday when they were all alive. (No, one hundred and thirty three days ago now.) “Take care of him,” Bones said.

“You underestimate your own importance, Leonard,” Spock said into the ruffled blankets at his knees. But he didn’t say, _I can’t, not without you_.

\--

Christine came back with a vicious smile and a series of exhausting exercises for him to do in between bouts lying in the claustrophobic tube rebuilding his muscles. They made a routine of their lives in a matter of days. Bones woke up before the start of shift and stared at the ceiling waiting for answers that he couldn’t find, Christine showed up with breakfast and put him in the chair. Spock showed up to talk about the emotional equivalent of weather and then left again with fond wishes at his speedy recovery.

And then torture, arm and leg-strengthening exercises, hour-long sessions in the tube that was trying to squeeze the last bit of his sanity out of him. And in between more gruel and a bit of bread, more exercises for his deflated muscles. And on the fifth day when he threw the tray across the room and screamed at the poor frightened nurse that dared to bother him, Chapel came back with medical text books. 

“You think I’ve forgotten how to be a damn doctor?” he demanded. His arms were sore and his legs ached and his chest was bound in bands of sharply contracting muscle that he couldn’t seem to control anymore. He felt rusty and overused. 

Chapel sat on the bed, knees bent and legs criss-crossed. Her hair was down and she was wearing her off-duty clothes. Her words were soft as fucking melted butter when she said, “there will be an evaluation. You lost all memory of who you and the people around you were.” She wasn’t here as a nurse, but the only one that hadn’t ever given up on him. She cleared her throat and tucked the blond curl of her hair behind her ear. “Anatomy and physiology,” she said.

“What species?” Bones asked. 

“Your choice,” she said. And they started over, like he was nothing but an idiot at the brink of med school, stumbling through hallways with hangovers and a pretty-pregnant wife waiting for him at home. She filled his head with things, burned his ears with her words—soft as petals—until the visceral memory of hard university seats and countless sleepless hours staring at glossy PADD screens made his neck and shoulders wince-and-ache.

\--

“Nurse Chapel has informed me she has been assisting you in reviewing for your eventual evaluation,” Spock said. They were sitting on the observation deck, looking out over the stars that went on forever and ever. “Do you find that you remember most of what you are reviewing?”

“I’m still a God-damned doctor,” Bones said. Not because Spock doubted it but because he had to prove it (again, again). He was fresh out of the torture tube with his skin feeling rubbed raw from the accelerated growth of new muscle just beneath. He was falling behind; throwing fits at anyone that came near him. 

“It’s simple protocol,” Spock said. He wasn’t close enough to touch but a careful distance away. Bones hadn’t seen his face when Chapel convinced him that time away from sickbay was probably for the best but he’d seen the nurses’ faces whenever Bones was wheeled out of the place. They were sick with relief. “I am certain that you will pass with ease.”

That made one of them.

\--

“You have to stop,” Chapel shouted at him across the room. Her hair was pinned up and her bright-blue uniform was snug across her breasts. She was white-knuckled furious and he was blood-red mad. They were a famous set, the terrors of the Enterprise’s medical team. Once-upon-a-time, they’d made a cadet faint at the sight of them raging their way through another argument and toasted their unlikely victory in the evening. “This is uncalled for!”

“I called for it,” Bones shouted back.

“You’re acting like a child, a stupid arrogant little child that didn’t get what he wanted!” Chapel screamed. 

“I can’t fucking _walk_!” Not even now, not days-bleeding-to-weeks later. His legs were plump-and-pink again but they weren’t moving when he told them to and the fear was so real under his skin that he couldn’t think around it.

But Chapel rolled her eyes, hands on her hips and she said, “is your fucking heart beating? Is your God-damn brain working? _You’re_ the fucking doctor around here. How about you start acting like it?” It was on her face too, the fear that it was too-late now, that whatever she’d done, she hadn’t done it soon enough. Modern medicine had come so far and the human body was still an unknown thing. She was all anger until her body lurched forward, and it broke apart with every step, getting smaller and smaller until she was reaching out to touch him with cautious-tipped fingers.

He slapped her hands and she slapped him back, right across the face. 

“You will not get rid of me,” she said to him, “no matter how hard you try.” 

“You should have let me die,” he said back. Because it would have been easier-simpler to deal with like that. He could have slipped away in an unknown coma without worrying, without Jim, without any of them or the knowledge that his body was rotting away. He could have drifted off into a little bit of nothing. He would never have known what happened to the others.

“You will _not_ get rid of me,” she said.

\--

Leonard H. McCoy had made a lifetime of driving off people that loved him. He’d started young with puppies and toads, worked his way up to his dying mother (God rest her soul) and his slowly-graying father and he’d wedged a stake between himself and his old-Granny and he’d built a wall around his sister that he couldn’t ever fucking tear down. He’d ripped the heart out of his wife and he’d turned his back on his own fucking daughter when he couldn’t figure out how to tell her that he loved-her-really.

He’d spent months-and-years trying to get rid of Jim and he’d worked like hell to make sure that Spock never-ever had a single-fucking reason to think he was welcome or wanted. He’d made an art out of being hard to love, prickly and mean, poking and teasing and never-ever giving in. 

He was a sum of every single mistake he’d ever made, compounded over-and-over again. 

Chapel swore he’d never get rid of her and he took it in stride that she just didn’t understand how _mean_ he really was.

\--

“Leonard,” Spock said to him quietly, out of the medbay, taking up time looking at stars. He was too far away to touch, too soft to be really heard clearly. “I do not understand what you hope to accomplish.”

“Don’t you?” he said back, “I’m pretty fucking good at it. Look at Jim. Look at you.”

Spock’s eyebrows came down in steep slopes and his mouth when pale with pressure. His back snapped straight and he looked out at the stars. His answer was the nothingness in his blank stare.

“It’s okay,” Bones told him, “I know you loved him best.”

Spock looked at his own hands, opened his mouth and then closed it again without bothering to rebut his argument. They sat in stifled silence and waited until the unspoken timer ticked back to zero.

\--

“No,” Bones said to the books that Chapel brought in to review.

“No,” Bones said to the food that came slopping around a bowl.

“No,” Bones said to the terror tube that massaged his muscle back to life.

“No,” he said, again and again.

\--

Chapel came at the end of shift, pulling pins out of her hair, dressed in long soft pants and an old med-school shirt. She shook her head and took a moment in the tiny bathroom to brush her teeth before she came out again. 

“What in the hell are you doing?” he asked.

She turned down the lights, reached over his head to adjust the monitor that tracked his vitals and then pulled herself up into bed with him. Her body was slight against his, tucked in anywhere she could find a hollow. Her arm was a solid press against his side and her hair tickled at the side of his face and chin. She rested her head against his shoulder and let out a sigh. Her hand pressed over his chest and her legs went across his still-skinny thigh. “If you’re going to treat me like your wife, I guess I should get some of the benefits of the job.” Then she reached down to pull the sheet-and-blanket up over them. “Now get some sleep.”

“You’re not my wife,” he said.

“Mm,” she mumbled, “I bet you were nicer to her. Get some sleep.” 

\--

The morning came with the lights rising back up to full-throttle, sneaking through the dry-edged crack of his eyelids and making him mumble a groan that rattled in his throat and until he coughed it free. Everything was off-kilter; the weight of another body was dragging him backward. And he cocked his head, dug his elbows into the bed and lifted himself up to look down. 

Chapel frowned at him, at the way he twisted his body and left her laying on nothing but the warm space he’d been. She came awake by degrees, mumbling and grumbling and then opening her eyes and stretching her sore arms over her head. “We have got to fatten you up,” she mumbled.

“What in the hell are you trying to do?” Bones demanded.

She dug her own elbows in, lifted her bed up so she was mostly sitting, one leg hanging off the bed and her whole upper body twisted around to look at him. “Nothing,” she said.

“Then get the hell out of my bed,” he said.

“Your wife cheated on you, didn’t she?” Chapel asked. Her hair was in a knot on one side and her whole face was younger-now with no make up to age her. 

“Go,” he said.

“I don’t remember if you told me who she was cheating with—I just assumed it was anyone but you. I mean, it’s not like I wouldn’t let you eat crackers in my bed but you’re not exactly the nicest guy in the world. How did you even convince her to marry you?” And her face was so blank, so sincere, and she shifted her knee so it was farther up on the bed and raked her fingers through her hair as she looked away from him like he wasn’t even there.

“She was fucking her boss,” Bones said.

“Kind of ironic how you were fucking the boss a couple of months ago, both of them, actually.” She twisted her hair into a bun and then flopped back on the bed. “Maybe you’re just really bad at sex.”

“I don’t need you to show me how mean I am,” Bones said. 

Chapel twisted around, rolled on her side and reached up to pull him back down, flat against the bed. Her body was warm and foreign against him all these hours later. He’d forgotten a lot about women’s bodies, about the way they moved and the way they felt. “I don’t need you wasting all my time trying to drive me away,” she said back. “You’re just going to have to work on accepting that I’m not going anywhere.”

There was nobody in the world but the space between their faces. She was heartbroken for him, ragged and bleeding in a way that he couldn’t make himself be. Every nerve-ending gone numb in him was alive with fire in her. “I don’t know what I’m fighting for,” he said.

“Yourself,” Chapel said. 

“I don’t think that’s as encouraging as you think it is.” (What he meant, well, he just wasn’t _worth_ all this effort. Wasn’t that obvious?) But he relaxed against her, let the warmth of her lull him into a stupor and enjoyed the peaceful nothingness of it.

\--

But the days went on—and on—and on. Wake up, suck on gruel, endure the torture tube, arm-and-leg exercises, sit with Spock in shared silence like dragging his nails across broken glass and back to bed again.

Three-or-four days later, Chapel was quizzing him on Andorian diseases when he said, “what did they tell Joanna?” (What a father he was, all this time later, wondering what they told some little girl that had long-since moved on without him.)

There was a stutter-stop to Chapel’s words and she smoothed her hand across the screen on the PADD and searched through all the words she had to explain herself to him. “When it became apparent that you weren’t going to die we let her know that you had been injured on a mission. When you woke up we let her and the rest of your family know that you were recovering.”

“What did they say?” Bones asked.

“They said you would be mean as a snake. I assured them that I could handle you and your sister said to tell you that no matter what had happened it couldn’t be worse than the week you got the spots and broke your leg.”

Oh hell, what a great time in his life that had been. He’d been riddled with itches, aching from fever with his leg broken in three places and his mother-and-father shaking their heads over his good fortune.

“You didn’t say.” 

Chapel shrugged, “you never talk about them. That usually means you don’t really care for them. I figure after what happened with the Captain the last thing you needed was more motivation to feel sorry for yourself.”

Bones laughed at that—bitter and dark. “Well, I’m fighting for myself now, I guess.”

“If you were smart that’s what you would have always been fighting for,” Chapel said. Then she slid right back into the book like there had never been an interruption. 

\--

Sex wasn’t anything that Bones had ever been obsessed with or even overly interested in outside the context of being in love with someone. His sister told him once-upon-a-time when he was still young and friendly that it was because he was one-in-a-million kind of guy whose dick followed after his heart and not the other way around. So sex was a stressful kind of thing he sometimes-found himself interested in and almost never cared about without the rapid-rabid beat of his heart.

But nobody touched him anymore. And a handful of yesterdays he was in the center of a sandwich full of bodies that he was in love with: Jim’s worshipful breath against his neck and Spock’s over-heated hands on his thighs. Bones was used to being aggravated with touch and the silence of his aloneness was compounded by the static nothingness where touch once was. Spock, when he came to visit, didn’t put his hands on him and Chapel with quick-efficiency never touched him longer than necessary.

Those other nurses, they kept their distance when they could and leaned forward with long-long arms to drop things at his side and never ever came close enough to touch him.

He was suddenly starving for it, overwhelmed with the lack of it.

“You think Jim would get over himself long enough to fuck me one last time?” Bones asked Chapel when she settled into place for a study session. It wasn’t even sex he wanted, just the weight and heat of another body against his, the security of that familiarity. 

Chapel snorted, without humor, and slid off the end of the biobed to come over and nudge his arms out of the way so she could sit in his lap. Her arm went around his back. “I think,” she said as she balanced the PADD on her lap over his, “there are easier ways to ask for a hug.”

“I don’t like anything easy.”

“Well that’s a whole separate problem you have,” she said. She shifted a little and put his hand on her knees while she read to him, pausing here and there to ask him questions that he had memorized a hundred-thousand days ago. They stayed until the lights were dimming, and evening was falling over the world they’d left behind a long-long time ago. She was curled up against him and he was drowsy with warmth. Her fingers picked at the lint on her pants and he sighed heavily from somewhere deep in his chest. “Just so we’re clear,” she said with her hand falling into place over his, “I’m never going to fall in love with you.”

“I would never assume anything of the sort.”

“He’ll come back,” she said, “and if you really want to have sex, you’ll have to show a little more liveliness during your physical therapy sessions or I won’t clear you. I’m sure Spock would sprint across the ship if you whistled for him.”

That was quite an image. “Really? He won’t even talk to me.”

“He never left you, Leonard. Jim—he came and went, but Spock was here every single day. He followed you into hell and pulled you back out. Maybe you’ve got a good enough reason to doubt Jim but not Spock.” She stretched out across his lap, dropped her feet back to the floor and stood up with her arms over her head, back bowing a full-body stretch. “Time for bed. Remember to think of your poor neglected sex life when I tell you to move your feet.” She was smiling again—really smiling—and he frowned at it the way he always-always had.

\--

“Let’s make a deal,” Bones said the next time Spock came with the same-sturdiness. “I take three steps and you use your superior logic to convince Chapel I can have sex again.” He left the implied end (with you) unspoken and trusted his intention would be clear.

Spock raised an eyebrow at that, stalled in the middle of transferring him from bed to wheelchair. “I am offended that you assume I would agree to such a cheap price. Furthermore, I believe that our previous deal is still unfulfilled.”

“I haven’t forgotten that miracle you think I have stuck up my sleeve. Five steps.” He’d never been much good at bargaining. His skill set lay in bluffing at cards and Spock didn’t look much like he’d go off and take a bet from a man that was well known on the Enterprise to be the worst card shark this side of the known galaxy. 

“I will accept no less than seven steps,” Spock said. He put out his hand (because Bones had explain this to him once) and Bones shook on it. Then he put all his weight on his useless legs and felt the wince-pull-protest as he worked up to a shuffle while Spock held onto him with both arms.

\--

“This isn’t exactly the kind of motivation I was hoping to inspire,” Chapel said. She was at the end of the double bars, leaning forward with her chin in her hands while she watched.

Bones was sweating a river down his back, over his face, in his eyes, everywhere on his body while he begged-pleaded-cursed-demanded his feet to move the way they’d been moving for the past thirty-some years of his life. “Fighting for myself isn’t nearly as appealing as Vulcan-induced orgasms.” 

Chapel rolled her eyes at that and straightened up. She’d lost the harrowed-harried-hollow look she had when he woke up, put weight back on under her uniform and gone all pink and bright colored again. “At the rate you’re going it’s more likely that Spock is going to die of blue balls before you get any orgasms.”

“Green, actually,” Bones said. He made it two steps in a row before the effort was exhaustive and he had to stop and lean hard to one side against the bars. 

Chapel watched him without pity, with no offer to help and no words of encouragement. But her nose wrinkled up at the thought and she said, “but his lips are pink.”

“Pink lips, green blood—green balls. He’s a Vulcan of great contradictions.” Then he used the towel hanging off his shoulder to rub against his face and set his feet on the blue streak marking his progress. 

\--

“Four steps is not the same as seven, Leonard.” But Spock was close enough to get his arms around and sturdy enough to keep them both from falling over. He didn’t protest nearly-hard enough before he fell into kissing him like he’d been dying from lack of it. 

It’d never been easy for them, never been without protests and problems. They hadn’t ever gotten along well and Bones didn’t have any expectation of them ever managing such an outrageous feat. But this, hands and arms and lips and the quiet whisper-slick slip of tongue against his—this they had figured out early on. Jim was brash and presumptive and Spock was studious and slow and Bones was an ever changing chameleon of moods and wants. His body was seventy-five percent and his mind was one hundred and twenty, and Spock was hanging onto him like he was fine-fucking china. 

Bones’ breath was ragged when he leaned back, put his weight on his own heels and stood upright without much of anything keeping him that way. He smiled at Spock’s slack-jawed shock and rubbed his palm across his day-end rough cheek and licked his own lips. “What did I do to you?”

The question didn’t follow along the line of thought but Spock had hands on his skin and felt his thoughts projecting out like a vibration that came from somewhere deep in the center of his skull. “You apologized to me for taking away someone I loved. You professed a sincere depth of sympathy for the pain you imagined me to be in.” But there was something else, and Spock licked his lips as their bodies fell into place one-against-the-other. He said, “you never forgot me.” Then they were kissing like they just couldn’t fucking help it and Bones tugged and yanked and knocked them both over onto the biobed with Spock crawling up his body. 

Vulcan strength was a marvel to behold, a true wonder when the man could pick you up like you were nothing at all and lay you out just like he wanted. Bones held onto him with fists and stiff arms, biting lost-time and hurt-feelings into his mouth.

The wailing of the monitor over the biobed abrupt ended with Chapel’s hand slapping against the silence button. Spock looked cowed like a small child caught in the cookies before he cleared his throat and extracted himself from the tangle of Bones’ body and stood at the bedside going green with (surely not) embarrassment. “I apologize,” he said.

Bones put his arms behind his head, feet crossed at the ankle and a smile stretching across his face while Chapel stared at him with amused ferocity. He wasn’t fucking sorry at all and she wasn’t mad at him for it either.

\--

One-two-three-four. If learning to walk was this fucking hard, toddlers must have been miniature geniuses. He thought of all of those early-early years with Joanna when she was nothing but trouble in the small spans of time he had to offer her and how Jocelyn was always full of stories about how their baby had gone off and thrown herself head first off the bed _again_ like she wasn’t ever going to learn not to.

“Think with your balls,” Chapel said when he stuttered on step number five. 

\--

It wasn’t that he wasn’t still angry, because it came to him in balls of fury that had him kicking and spitting and cursing. His whole fucking life had been ripped out from under him. It boiled in the spaces between his ribs now-and-again like heartburn that couldn’t be soothed away.

It was four weeks later, in all, when Chapel said, “I think you should go back to sleeping your quarters.”

“Did you move the bathroom closer to the bed?” he asked. Because it was a hell of a lot more than four steps between the two and he still wasn’t very good at making it that far without struggling. 

“No,” Chapel said, “but there are alternatives to redecorating the Enterprise.” She didn’t give him time to protest the use of walking aides before she went on with, “I’ll clear you for whatever physical activity you want. You need to get out of here.” 

“Don’t think I don’t realize what you’re trying to do,” he said. But he had no fucking idea what she wanted from him as she packed up the few things he’d managed to gather in up in the past few weeks and kicked him out of his very own private room at the edge of sick bay. He hadn’t forgotten the way to his own quarters but the trip there was surreal in a way he didn’t expect.

And inside, nothing out of place—nothing amiss from how he remembered it. Chapel shoved him to his feet with brutal efficiency and fit his hands around the handles of a ‘walking aide’ and looked at him with great expectation. “Don’t be an idiot,” she said to him.

\--

So this was his life, the debris of things that he’d collected and dropped. The leftovers of the last time Jim had slept here with him and the neatly organized spread of Spock’s things on a low shelf. They’d made an art out of sharing single rooms, ignored the logic of using Jim’s since it was Captain’s Quarters and the nicest fucking room on the ship. 

He sat by himself for a while, denting the cushions of his couch and pushing his hands down between them to root out a sock that he remembered had gotten stuck in there the last time Jim stripped him naked right here. They were terrible at making it to sanctioned surfaces. Jim had a thing for Bones on his lap that bordered on obsessive and Bones had a thing for Jim’s delighted little smile. 

Had, here being the most important word. 

So he leaned back into the cushion with the sock in his fist, eyes closed and thinking of miracles. (Sweet, wonderful miracles.)

\--

“I counted six,” Spock said. It would have made a difference to him, really, except for how it was gasped out between this kiss and that one. Spock was solid and hot and half-naked, pushing Bones’ naked thighs open and slipping up between them. He was still wearing standard issue uniform pants that were hard to pry open when three-quarters of Bones’ brain had dropped straight out the bottom of his skull. 

“I don’t care,” Bones mumbled back. He leaned his head back and then down, chin-to-chest while he yanked and pried Spock’s pants open and smiled with a breathless laugh at the impatient way they were wrenched down and kicked off. Spock was naked-to-green-blush and kissing him again. Both of his hands grabbed Bones, threaded fingers through and shoved them flat against the mattress. 

“Oh God,” he mumbled, “fuck me.” And if it was desperate and irrational, Spock didn’t even take a moment to object. 

\--

“Is Jim going to be mad at you?” Bones asked when it was done and Spock had mopped them clean with a spare rag. He was laying naked across Bones bed now, letting himself be petted in a way that had taken months to train him into. His eyes had gone half-closed and his breathing had evened out and he was all at once completely at peace. 

The question made his eyebrows twitch, his hands reflexively twitch into fists and loose again. He tipped his head back, looked up at Bones leaning against the headboard over him. “You assume that his preferences hold a significant importance to me at this point. Jim did not only withdraw his affections from you.” _He left me too_ , was what Spock couldn’t say outright.

“When?” Bones asked.

“At approximately the same time, although he did not officially state his intentions for another seventeen days.” No, of course not. Spock shifted back into place, let his eyes close completely and accepted every stroke of Bones’ hands across his hair and skin with all the love-sick grace of a well-fed house cat.

\--

Making it the distance between his quarters and Captain’s quarters was a feat comparable to climbing a mountain made of ice. The crew was happy to move out of his way and act as if they’d seen nothing and it might have been that cheerful ignorance that saved them from his misplaced wrath.

Jim’s door opened with the same sequence and admitted him with a cheerful chirp of recognition. The interior had been stripped down to the bones, left with nothing remotely personalized but scrubbed to Starfleet Standard Issue. Bones took a seat at the little table and let out a sigh.

“What a mess,” he said to himself.

\--

There was no miracle to have. Jim found him at the table when he came back from his shift. He’d gone old in the time between then and now. His face was lean and his shoulders were slumped from exhaustion. His skin—once golden with pride—was sick gray with defeat. He didn’t have the good grace to act surprised but took a seat opposite him with the same air of impervious authority he used against men that terrified the shit out of him. 

He’d stared at Khan with no less hostility that he looked at Bones with. 

“You made me a promise,” Bones said.

“Yeah, well,” Jim said with one hand flat on the table and the other hovering between rubbing the back of his neck and punching a wall, “you _died_ so we’ll consider my promise fulfilled in full. Remind me to change the door lock?”

“You made me a promise,” Bones said again. 

Jim stared at him, all hollowed out and poured full of fury. He had never been the kind that could sit aside while something happened, never come up against something that couldn’t be defeated before. He was full of cleverness. 

Bones shifted in his seat, pushed his feet against the floor and used his brand-new muscle to move himself. It wasn’t getting any easier but the twinge of objection was enough to ground him to the here-and-now when he wanted to start screaming about broken hearts and entitled assholes. 

It went on, dragging in the space between them. Jim was think-think-thinking his way around this one. 

“You,” Bones started again.

But Jim slapped the table and shoved himself upward, turned his back to him like it was a good enough mask. His hand was against his mouth, scrub-rubbing at his lips that were bleeding-red chapped. He was all violence when he turned back around, “then I broke it. And you’re a piss-poor loser.”

“You made me a promise,” Bones said.

“You have Spock,” Jim said.

“You made me a promise.”

Jim punched the table with the bottom of both his fists, body folding in half, blue eyes gone insane like the tilt of his head. He was hanging on by the very last shred of his sanity and it was fraying away. There were a hundred-thousand things he just hadn’t ever brought himself to admit and a couple more that he couldn’t find the time or courage to deal with. (Jim had told him once-upon-a-time that Winona had left him behind the day he was fucking born and he’d grown up in the house of a man who hated him every bit as much as Jim hated him. You could see it on his face, in catches and slips, the little boy that grew up without someone to love him.) “What the hell do you want from me!” Jim screamed at him, “I can’t do it. You _left_ me. You _destroyed_ me.”

“You made me a promise,” Bones said—calmly now, very calmly.

“Fuck you,” Jim said. He shoved himself away from the table, walked away from him to attend to a shower. He took his time about hiding, sequestered himself in the box-small bathroom and came back with a towel scrubbing his hair and his skin gone pink from heat. He didn’t sit but stared at him still sitting there. 

Bones shifted in his seat again, leaned back against the back of it and didn’t look away until long after Jim had. 

Jim was staring at the ground, towel in his fist fallen down by his side, other hand a useless length of fingers. “It’s not fair,” he said (to himself, to Bones, to nothing), “but it’s what it is. Promise or no, I’m not coming back.”

\--

Spock wasn’t disappointed or surprised by the confirmation of what he’d known. His heart had been broken already so there was no point in cracking it open again. He took the news with a nod of his head and spent the evening after assisting Bones with reviewing for his evaluation.

\--

After, like after he’d been upgraded from a walking aide to a cane and his legs started to remember this thing where they moved on command. After, like after he was reinstated as a real doctor and he started clearing out the endless pile of shit that had gone moldy with disuse on his desk. After, like after Spock had made a habit of stopping by his quarters in the evening and they had made a disaster of a relationship with their bickering fights and quick-bursts of fucking.

Bones found the files about his medical treatment and he read over them with one hand rubbing at his still-aching thigh between one patient and the next. Chapel interrupted him now and again with another patient or another signature she needed. There were missions and causalities and research to be done.

One hundred and thirty two days of intense medical treatment took him a solid week of reading to catch up on. 

\--

“Show me,” Bones said when he cross-legged on the bed with Spock sitting just in front of him. He didn’t have to clarify, didn’t have bother with details because Spock had the nightmare stuck in his brain and he’d been waiting months to get it out again. His fingers were soft and rough all at once and their heads jumbled up into one shared brain.

Spock dropped them back into the bleak and endless nothing of his slow-dying mind and stayed just behind him, out of sight while Bones walked the path from two worthless rooms that made up a hose to the beaten-up metal bathtub. 

“Did you show him?” Bones asked.

“No,” Spock said quietly, “but I did explain to him the important aspects when he asked.”

\--

Bones hadn’t ever wanted to love Jim. He’d fought him tooth-and-nail for months, kicked and scratched and bitched and resisted him for years. But Jim wore him down, wore him straight through to the bones until there was no way he could resist anymore.

When his cane was just a fond memory and his body was still working through unexpected hiccups of pain, Bones found his way back to Jim’s quarters at the end of shift. He thumbed in the pass code that hadn’t ever changed and walked right in with no invitation. 

Jim was sitting at the table, staring at nothing at all. His face was too thin and all around his eyes had gone blackened from lack of sleep. He was nothing at all anymore like the boy he’d been. “I should change that,” he said—half to himself, half to nobody.

Bones put his hand on Jim’s neck, the other on his face and turned him around to look at him. His fingers slipped up into his hair, his thumb slid across Jim’s mouth. “You’re an idiot,” he said. Because it was true, because it made Jim smile like he was dying—quick and then gone. Bones pulled at twisted Jim’s body around to face him, felt how it sagged against his, the blunt pressure of Jim’s face against his stomach, butted up against his ribs. “I want you back,” he said, “because I made you a promise that I have every intention of keeping. So even if you don’t love me and even if you can’t ever come back, I’ll still love you.”

Jim’s arms were weighted and aged around him; his hands were loose fists in his shirt. His words were a muffled mumble, lost in the rolls of his shirt. 

“But you’re a fucking moron,” Bones said. “You can’t talk to me, you have to talk to someone. We’ve got three registered therapists on board, pick one and go talk to them or I’ll put you on involuntary medical leave for psychiatric reasons.”

“I knew giving you back your medical license was a bad idea.” But he didn’t move away, didn’t tell him to leave, didn’t shove him away.

\--

Spock remarked, just a few days later, that Jim seemed quantifiably _better_ without putting any qualifiers on what exactly ‘better’ constituted. Bones hummed an agreement that carried no weight because he’d been making wide circles around the ship avoiding Jim as best he could.

\--

Chapel found him in his office, flopped into a chair next to him and stretched her legs out to rest her feet on his lap. “I keep thinking that I’m over everything. That I’ve managed to escape this whole ordeal without too many scars because it’s not as if it happened to me, you know? All of this?” she motioned around her, at the general area, at him, “happened to you. I keep thinking that I don’t have the right, I don’t have a reason, to be angry about it because it didn’t happen to me. Whatever happened to you, to Spock or to the Captain, it wouldn’t have been on me. But I’m so angry,” she said, “every time I think of it, every time I realize that all this time is gone now, that we almost lost you, that we’re not even back to normal, I get so _angry_.”

He raised an eyebrow at that, at the way she spoke with a perfectly peaceful cadence. Her cheeks were pink and her eyes were red. He thought (not for the first time) that he must be an idiot to be anything at all but in love with her. “It happened to you,” he said.

“I heard you made Jim go talk to someone,” she said, “I tried. But you know him, he wouldn’t listen to me and Spock couldn’t seem to get through to him either. They were a catastrophe without you. I’m pretty sure Chekov’s gone gray and Uhura took up drinking just to deal with them.”

Bones snorted, set down the PADD he’d been looking at and leaned back into the chair. “Maybe you should see someone too,” he said.

“Not yet,” Chapel said, “I’m not saying not ever but I thought I’d give it a few more weeks, see if I can convince myself I’ve got the right to be angry about everything. It was so easy to get caught up in taking care of you and so easy to forget to take care of myself. I’ve—destroyed friendships, I’ve forgotten how to be alone, I’ve done everything I possibly could have to neglect myself.”

Bones was working up to apologizing, maybe, because it was the nice thing to do. But he said, “thank you.” He couldn’t remember if he’d said it or when he’d said it but it bore repeating. “Thank you for not giving up on me. Thank you for letting every other part of your life go to shit to save me.”

Her smile was wobbly on the sides and her eyelashes went wet and she wiped them away with the pads of her fingers before she seemed to just crumble inward and lurched forward to wrap her arms around him. “I lied,” she mumbled into his cheek with no effort to explain herself.

He hugged her until she went still and calm again and let her go when she wanted to be let go. “I think you should talk to someone,” he said.

“Yes well, I think you shouldn’t be so easily accepting of the shit lot that you drew this time. I would make them grovel at my feet, you know.”

Bones smiled at that. “You’re underestimating me if you don’t think I have them on their knees on a nightly basis.” And her smile was so bright and filthy.

\--

They kept on, taking baby-steps toward a sense of normalcy. Spock excused himself from Bones’ bed to make amends with Jim in the evening. Every-other day and sometimes over other-two days, he was back with renewed vigor and Bones reaped the benefits and bit back the jealous sting.

Spock hadn’t gone off and died no matter what Jim had tried to do to save him. 

\--

“I’m sorry,” Jim said at his door in med bay. He stood there in his Captain’s uniform, taking a break from the bridge and whatever planet they were meant to investigate this time. “I know that nothing was your fault and I know that everything I did was wrong and that I should have been better for you—and I wasn’t. And I’m sorry.” 

Bones had lost count of the days since he woke up in a private room in medical bay, lost count of the number of times he’d woken up in the middle of the night with his arms catching at the phantom dream of Jim’s body moving away from his, lost track of how many bitter-hateful things he’d thought about the man and how many curses he’d put on him in his head. Everything he’d lost and he hadn’t once forgotten the promise he made the night he woke up with Spock’s desperate grasp against him begging him to bring Jim back.

“Yes, well you’re an idiot,” Bones said.

“I kind of need a real answer here,” Jim said. He hadn’t taken a step forward, wasn’t even leaning in toward him but standing stalwart and stiff in the doorway. 

“I’m angry,” Bones said, “I’m not promising you anything, I’m not sure I’m ready to forgive you. I’m not even sure that I want to forgive you. You made my life hell, you abandoned me.”

Every word was a physical blow against Jim’s determination until he was all but actually flinching in place. His face went pink-with-spots and his lips went flat as he pressed them together. It was a cruel-cruel thing to do, to crush him like that.

“I love you though,” Bones said, “so that’s what I’ve got to offer. You’re sorry and I’m not sure what I am.”

Jim’s voice cracked open when he said, “I love you,” like it was the most frightening thing he’d ever had to say. He didn’t come in, didn’t try to touch him, just cleared his throat and excused himself back to duty.

\--

Spock was half-way through fucking him when Bones dug his nails into his back and tightened his thighs around Spock’s skinny hips to still him in place. “Bring Jim back,” he said. Because it had been two days since an abortive attempt at reconciliation and he was thinking about how much he wanted to punch that cowardly little bastard when he should have been thinking about how much he loved the way Spock knew how to work him over.

Spock licked at his lips, teeth bare in territorial aggression and hands ripping at the sheets under Bones’ back. He didn’t say a damn word but kissed him hard enough to draw blood and fucked bruises into his skin.

\--

Jim came back on a Thursday, after a long day on a dusty planet, worn out and exhausted. Spock didn’t drag him with his hands but led him along like a skittish animal. They moved around each other they were playing human pinball, banging awkwardly together and separating again in a hurry all without making a single move. 

Spock was standing, ragged with dust and Jim was slouching on Bones’ couch just filthy with dirt. Bones was bored from a long time sequestered in the med bay waiting to be useful. He moved toward Spock first, licked at his mouth until Spock was leaning against him, making useful motions to tug at his shirt. Bones let himself be stripped out of his shirts before he pulled away.

Jim was staring up at him, like he hadn’t even seen him naked (not once, not a hundred times) and maybe he hadn’t, not since Bones had his body rebuilt. It wasn’t the same, leaner now than it was before, harder with muscle where he’d been softer before. Spock had taken a few tries to figure how to touch him with any familiarity and Bones had taken weeks to get used to seeing his own body again.

But Jim’s hands were still magnetized to his skin, still reached up to grip him around the waist when Bones spread his knees across Jim’s lap and slid down to sit on him. His mouth was still blood-hot and rough when they kissed. His quick-clever tongue was still just as dangerous as it slipped into Bones’ mouth. 

“Boy, don’t you ever leave me again,” Bones whispered to him. Jim pressed their foreheads together with both of his hands pushing Bones’ pants down off his hips. “Are you going to fuck me now?”

Oh, and the way Jim groaned, the way his cheek slipped against Bones face and his hands went tight across his ass.

\--

“You’re so lazy,” Jim said when Bones was floppy from sex, lying across his own bed with a pile of bodies holding him in place. There was a hesitant lilt in the words, like they belonged a time before and not here-and-now. 

“No,” Bones said, turning his face toward Jim’s without opening his eyes, “I’m just smarter than you.” And Jim kissed him again, hand curled around his ribs like he was still afraid that Bones would slip-away if he didn’t. 

“I believe it is a successful synergy: Leonard wishes to be worshipped sexually and we wish to worship him,” Spock said. He was close enough to make Bones sweat and start thinking crazy thoughts about going another round when he was nowhere near ready. 

\--

“I see you got your sex life back,” Chapel said before the start of shift when they were prepping for a surgery and the hickey on his neck was more than noticeable with the surgical scrubs on. She was impressed—not angry—and he was red with pride (not embarrassment).

“Maybe you should look into getting a sex life,” he said, “and you wouldn’t be so interested in mine.”

“You say that like you aren’t the headline of the ship’s gossip rag six out of the seven days of the week. Your sex life is more important to half the crew than the memo you sent out about touching unknown plants while on shore leave.” She tucked her hair up into the surgical cap and stepped up to the sink to start scrubbing her hands down.

“We’ll see how important my sex life is when their skin starts to slough off,” he muttered before he put his foot on the pedal for the hot water. “Thanks again,” he said when his hands were surgical clean. 

Chapel smiled, head tilted to the side away from where she was rinsing her hands. “My pleasure,” she assured him.


End file.
